Neil Young: Failed Warner/YouTube Negotiations ‘Penalized’ Artists

Neil Young has gone on the record in support of music powerhouse Warner Bros. Reprise’s policy deleting and muting its artists’ videos on YouTube, after negotiations between Google and Warner broke down.

The legendary singer, guitarist and songwriter says consistent standards need to be hammered out to compensate artists and other copyright holders fairly when their music appears on YouTube.

The problem, he says, is that Warner was open to a fault in its embrace of YouTube, so it signed an early deal worth less than the ones Google offered other music companies. "YouTube was in its fledgling stages when Warner made an early deal to work with them," wrote Young. "Today, other labels have made more lucrative deals for their artists at YouTube."

Update (3/3/09): Google/YouTube spokesman Chris Dale responded to this post with the claim that labels are responsible for negotiating deals to compensate their artists. "YouTube connects music, musicians, and fans," he wrote. "We have deals with all of the other major record labels and with musicians, songwriters, and other independent creative producers. It is the record labels’ responsibility to represent and pay their artists."

Much of Young’s music was removed from the site along with that of countless other artists after the negotiations broke down. According to Young, the underlying reason for this is that no strong industry standard exists for paying artists and copyright holders exists for online videos. Everything has to be renegotiated each time,and when these negotiations fail, it hurts fans and artists in addition to the companies doing the negotiating.

The removal of audio tracks affects not only the official videos, but mash-ups and user-generated videos that use the tracks, for which YouTube compensates copyright holders. When the tracks disappear, people stop creating these derivative works, which deprives artists and copyright holders of the addition plays and blog embeds that make a video grow in popularity.

"YouTube has a responsibility to respect the artists it facilitates and resist punishing them to make a business point," wrote Young. "It is time for industry-wide standards of artist compensation on the web."